Despite its reputation for dysfunction, Congress has racked up some notable successes this year — even bipartisan successes.

Votes from both parties were required to give “fast-track” authority to the president to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, for example, and there is broad bipartisan support for an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law that has been in limbo since 2007.

But critical issues remain where consensus is elusive if not impossible until another election has passed. And one of those issues, unfortunately, is tax reform.

Tax reform is important because it has the potential to make the tax code fairer and more conducive to economic growth. It can help keep U.S. corporations competitive in a global marketplace. And it should simplify tax filings for Americans burdened with heavy and growing compliance costs.

But for the time being, tax reform appears a hopeless goal.

The latest evidence in support of this sour forecast are reports from the Senate Finance Committee’s five tax-reform working groups that were finalized recently after six months of work.

F orbes’ Howard Gleckman nicely summarized the results in a recent column: The reports, he said, “endorsed reform in broad strokes and did a nice job of describing the issues at hand, but did practically nothing to move the ball.” Senators from the two parties simply could not agree on how to handle individual tax reform, business income taxes, international tax reform, or even savings and investment.

There was a single exception to this roll call of failure: the Community Development and Infrastructure panel, chaired by Sens. Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo. And even the Heller-Bennet recommendations represent their personal views, not those of the whole group.

A major focus of the Heller-Bennet report was shoring up the Highway Trust Fund (HTF). They proposed an interim solution of a tax on corporations’ past foreign earnings that could be funneled into infrastructure, and a possible long-term solution of a “mileage-based tax system” involving either GPS or a low-tech, non-GPS device to replace the current gas tax.

The senators emphasized that a pilot program with 5,000 volunteers is needed to judge the feasibility of such a program and that a complete system would take “up to a decade to fully implement.”

At the present rate, unfortunately, that’s how long it may take for Congress to agree on other essential components of a fairer, simpler tax code.

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